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1128. JANUARY. A MAJOR GATHERING AT TROYES, A TOWN IN CHAMPAGNE . . .

Whatever Pope Honorius II heard from the lips of Hugues de Payns moved him to convene an ecumenical council for January 13, the feast day of Saint Hilarius.¹ It would take place not in Rome but in the town of Troyes.

The city was named after its famous Trojan predecessor as a distant reminder of the Sicambrians, the descendents of the Trojans who settled nearby. By the twelfth century Troyes had become a center of commerce and hub of intellectual activity where an academy of esoteric studies and a Jewish Kabalist school flourished, founded by the famous medieval Rabbi Rashi; one of the school’s most illustrious alumni was Chrétien de Troyes, soon-to-be composer of a medieval Grail romance.

The choice of Troyes appears premeditated and predisposed to the key figures involved with the Knights Templar and the Cistercian Order, the city being eight miles from Hugues de Payns’s hometown,² and fifty from André de Montbard’s, the uncle of Bernard de Clairvaux, whose own abbey stood 33 miles to the east on land granted by Hugues de Payns’s cousin, Comte Hugh de Champagne, in whose territory all these places sat; conveniently, Hugh was also the Count of Troyes and, for a number of years now, a Templar knight.

“It would be difficult to tell them all,” wrote Jean Michel, the scribe in charge of covering the convening multitude of dignitaries steadily filling the vacuum of the cathedral. Over one hundred lords, archbishops, and kings arrived from French and Germanic kingdoms, warm bodies wrapped in silks and furs mingling about on a stone floor made colder by the January frost. Although the council had been convened by Pope Honorius II, the pontiff was absent; instead it would be presided over by Cardinal Matthew, and yet no one in the building would argue that Bernard de Clairvaux was the man in charge, such was his ambassadorial reputation, one augmented by a number of outstanding manuscripts on spiritual conduct he had recently published.

Respect was accorded.

There were several items on the agenda. First up was Baudoin II’s request for military and logistical support in Jerusalem, even though the king had already sent delegates to Rome the previous year to petition the pope for an identical appeal.³ Couldn’t this item have been dealt with in Rome?

The second main reason for summoning the council was to give a ruling on the quarrel between Louis VI and Bishop Stephen of Paris.⁴

Then came the third, an opportunity for the church to publicly endorse the Knights Templar, most of whose original members presently sat throughout the nave: Hugues de Payns, Godefroi de Saint-Omer, Payen de Mont-Didier, Archambaud de Saint-Aignan, Godefroi Bisol, and Brother Roland.

It has often been posited that the council was set up by the pope as an attempt by the Catholic Church to muscle in on whatever the Templars and the Cistercians were concocting between them. The Templars had been beavering away under Temple Mount for nine years now, and rumors were rife that they had discovered a treasure of some unspecified nature or stumbled upon documents of enormous import. There may be grounds for this. The fortuitous geographic location for the council and the extraordinary turnout of Europe’s finest nobles and clerics makes the conclave seem all too designed to find favor with a group of humble men.

Perhaps we will never know for certain, but we do know that Bernard did not see a need to sit in on the event. His reticence was on account of the pope insisting he preach a sermon soliciting new recruits to the Knights Templar to fight the Muslims—much like the one Urban II once preached at Clermont to draw a vast body of men into the Crusade. Bernard refused on humanitarian grounds, citing how “every human being is your neighbor. To kill your neighbor, even though he be a Muslim, is against the laws of Jesus Christ,” and as far as he was aware neither Christ nor the apostles had ever preached for a holy war. Neither did Bernard see warfare as the mission of the Templars, so much so that he excused himself from attending, adding, “Your reason for invading my peace is on account of matters that are either easy or difficult. If easy, my assistance is not necessary. If difficult, I am not in a state to attend to them—at least, I cannot do anything that is impossible to other men.”⁵

The pope did not acquiesce to his request and insisted that Bernard preside over the council, a shrewd move given Bernard’s diplomatic track record with clerics all over Europe. Bernard again declined on the grounds of illness, which indeed was true, he was suffering from a high fever.⁶ So the pope sent a litter and bearers to Clairvaux and had Bernard carried the 33 miles to Troyes.

Bernard de Clairvaux was a visionary of his time, a man of great literacy, scrupulous in the face of opposition, and a figure of great influence on the religious beliefs and orders of the day. So in his discourse to the council he drew a comparison between secular soldiery and the soldiery of Christ. His proselytizing illustrated just how different in the eyes of God are the bloodshed and slaughter perpetrated by the secular militarist and the actions of the knight pursuing a noble ideal: “Among you, indeed, nought provoketh war or awakeneth strife, but either an irrational impulse of anger, or an insane lust of glory, or the covetous desire of possessing another man’s lands and possessions. In such causes it is neither safe to slay nor to be slain.” He followed by stating how the “soldiery of God and the soldiery of the world differ from one another,” and how the perfect knight is “careful to preserve the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”⁷

He reached for a decanter of water and continued with renewed vigor. “There is no doubt that murder is always evil, and I would forbid you to slay these pagans if another means can be found to prevent them from oppressing the faithful. But as things stand, it is better to fight them with arms than to allow them to prevail over the just, for fear that the righteous be delivered into iniquity.”⁸

Bernard was hardly naïve; he knew that in his time war was sometimes necessary to remove lands from people who had little regard or respect for others, even life itself. People needed to fight in self-defense or in circumstances where property or people had been wrongfully taken—such as the case with the city of Lisbon and its inhabitants, who were all seized by the Moors and held for over three-and-a-half centuries.⁹ The Middle Ages were violent times, often bordering on the barbaric, and violence would inevitably come knocking, even on the doors of monks, and often it did. Bernard’s point was that if knights took up arms not to cause harm but to defend a just cause, they had nothing to fear, and he reiterated the point by making a distinction between spiritual and secular knights—the latter being empty and violent, the animalistic condition of the baser human being.

Nevertheless, enormous pressure was put upon Bernard by various members of the council. The ailing abbot capitulated and reluctantly endorsed the church’s plan. Perhaps the final item on the agenda was worth a small compromise.

Hugues de Payns was invited to present his case to the council. The Templar Grand Master stood up and walked to the center of the delegation. He was oddly dressed for a knight; there were no coats of arms, no silks, no furs; instead, Hugues appeared to be a kind of old hermit, tattered garments and all. Nevertheless, he was eloquent in his speech, outlining the creation of the Knights Templar, their aims, and the difficulties of doing their work in Jerusalem. “Often,” he said, “I hear ‘Why do you labor in vain? Why do you expand so much effort to no purpose? Those men whom you serve acknowledge you as partners in labor but are unwilling to share in brotherhood. When do the benefactions of the faithful come to the Templars by the faithful throughout the whole world?’”¹⁰

His request was straightforward: to continue its work the brotherhood required logistical support, the blessing and recognition of the church (a prerequisite in those days), and a moral code to guide and govern the new members of the growing Order. And this would suffice.

Hugues and the Templars received the papal approval they sought, and a Latin Rule was drafted among the ecclesiasts and seculars present, some of whom were illiterate. The code of conduct was seventy-two articles long, labored, stringent, rigorous, and austere, a fine stereotype of design-by-committee. It requested, among many things, stringent devotional exercises, fasting, prayer, submissiveness, and gentleness, even the observance of what food should be eaten on Fridays. For example:

Rule VI: We have it that . . . when you hear the divine service you stay standing for too long. We do not advise this; in fact we condemn it. We command that everyone, strong and weak alike, should sit down when the psalm . . . is finished, as well as the invitation and the hymn, so as to avoid scandal.

Rule X: In general, brothers should eat in pairs so that one may look after the other with care lest the harshness of life or secret abstemiousness become part of the communal meal.

Rule XXXVIII: No brother should presume to exchange his belongings with another brother nor ask him for anything, without the permission of the master, and even then it should be small, trifling and unimportant.

Rule XLVII: We specially command and direct every professed brother that he venture not to shoot in the woods either with a longbow or a cross-bow; and for the same reason, that he venture not to accompany another who shall do the like, except it be for the purpose of protecting him from the perfidious infidel.

Et cetera. Some articles at least bear Bernard’s fingerprint, such as the attention to “the consummation of the divine mysteries.” Also:

Rule VIII: . . . in emulation of the psalmist, who says, I have set a watch upon my mouth; that is, I have communed with myself that I may not offend, that is, with my tongue; that is, I have guarded my mouth, that I may not speak evil.

Rule XX: To all the professed knights . . . white garments, that those who have cast behind them a dark life may know that they are to commend themselves to the Creator by a pure and white life.

Rule XXXVII: We will not that gold or silver, which is the mark of private wealth, should ever be seen on your bodies.

Since the Rule also made distinctions between different members of the Knights Templar—knights, sergeants, priests, and clerks for religious services, and servants and artisans—it demonstrates how the Order had expanded well beyond the original nine (or eleven) men.¹¹ Although the Rule was overwhelmingly religious in nature, several clauses were added pertaining to the military duties of the Templars, although clearly this was not an Order whose core members had been doing much fighting, if any at all. The long-winded document was drafted, then edited by Bernard, and penned by “the humble scribe of these present pages,” Jean Michel.¹²

And yet for all its worth the Latin Rule may well have been nothing more than an academic exercise. Despite the laborious craft, its final paragraph states that the Rules should be left to the discretion of the Grand Master, and thus of no real official value; over the next 140 years successive Grand Masters would subtly amend the Rule with more than six hundred additional clauses.

Regardless, of greater value was that by January 14, 1128, the Order of the Knights Templar gained official recognition from Rome.